By Reuben Gampel
I watched as my friends choked up at Belzec, the Nazi death camp, where six hundred thousand Jews were murdered. I saw tears fall from their eyes in the deceptively serene Lopuchowo forest, where in one week, the Nazis liquidated the Jews of Tykocin, a town that days earlier was seventy percent Jewish. Yet, I felt numb. Millions of men, women, and children were killed in Poland, from the very young to the very old, and I could not scream or even weep. When I spoke with my parents later that evening, I told them I felt empty, tohu vavohu. My father reassured me that everyone processes tragedy differently and that I needed to give myself time to work through all that I experienced. But day after day, exploring horror after horror, my usually deep well of empathy seemed dry. However, on Friday night, in Krakow, our group sat together and discussed all we had seen and experienced. Suddenly, I felt a torrent of emotion and Amon Göth’s speech from Schindler’s List poured out of me: “For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened. Today is history.” Ralph Fiennes’ monologue encapsulated the surreal enormity of the Holocaust and gave me language to access my emotions, allowing me to mourn.
That night I cried myself to sleep and had nightmares, but when I awoke on Shabbat morning, I felt refreshed and hopeful. True, I was in a former Jewish metropolis, where Jews had once comprised a quarter of the population, and today were but a mere footnote. But we, a group of yeshiva bochurim, were here, openly and proudly worshiping, being our authentic selves. Our presence in this city was a testament to both Nazi failure and Jewish resilience. On Sunday, while wrapped in my tefillin as the sun rose over Auschwitz II-Birkenau, I felt deeply connected to the many camp inmates, who risked their lives to daven. I explored barracks that warehoused countless Jews, observed the remnants of gas chambers, and walked the grounds where monstrous atrocities occurred. Now, I could hear the cries of babies as they were murdered and smell the pungent odor of burning flesh. My tears fell where so many had wept before me. After an emotionally taxing day, our tour guide, Yitzi Kempinski, roused us to sing Am Yisrael Chai arm in arm as we left this temple to genocide, as a rebuke to the absurd notion that Jews are nothing more than rumor. In the weeks since I returned to yeshiva, I have spent many hours contemplating all I experienced. What stays with me is the callousness of the gentile population, who turned on their Jewish friends and neighbors with zeal, facilitating mass murder on an unfathomable scale. Even today, townspeople raise their families in the shadows of concentration camps. Indeed, at Majdanek I witnessed many impassively riding their bicycles past intact crematoria, whose walls are still stained blue from Zyklon B gas. Were these people any different than their ancestors? I wondered. How hard would it really be to whip up the locals into a murderous, anti-Semitic frenzy, acting like their parents and grandparents did, only a few decades earlier? However, before I get too morose, my heart fills with gratitude to Hashem for the State of Israel, confident that its existence ensures that we will never again know the horrors of the Shoah.
Am Yisrael Chai!
Reuben Gampel graduated from DRS and is now learning at Yeshivat HaKotel. Reuben was chosen to receive the 5TJT Student Journalism Award in 2022.
